Mark Zuckerberg Says Fake News On Facebook Did Not Sway The U.S. Election

After posting a vague
Facebook status on Wednesday after the presidential election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered a more detailed response to Donald Trump's win during an on-stage interview on Thursday, in which he disputed claims that fake news on the social network swayed the election and said the app does not contribute to ideological echo chambers.

During an interview at Techonomy's 2016 conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Zuckerberg said the idea that fake news circulating on Facebook could have influenced the election was "pretty crazy," describing fake news as a "very small amount" of total content. Zuckerberg said Facebook's algorithm, which delivers content to nearly 2 billion monthly users, is intended to reflect "what people want" and what is "meaningful and interesting to them."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about his response to this week's presidential election and Facebook's role in distributing news at Techonomy's conference in Half Moon Bay on Thursday. (Associated Press)

"Voters make decisions based on their lived experience," Zuckerberg said. "We really believe in people. You don’t generally go wrong when you trust that people understand what they care about, and you build systems that reflect that."

However, Zuckerberg noted that improvements can and should always be made to the algorithm, saying it can always be made "smarter and better."

Zuckerberg also defended Facebook's decision to permit what some employees and users saw as hate speech by Trump on the social network. Zuckerberg said these posts by Trump were permitted because they are part of "mainstream political discourse."

Zuckerberg also disputed that Facebook can inhibit people from consuming diversified news sources and creates an echo chamber of ideas for users.

"We've studied this a lot, and I really care about it," Zuckerberg said. "All the research that we have suggests that this isn’t really a problem. We’ve had a really hard time getting that out."

Zuckerberg noted that in previous decades before Facebook and the web existed, it was much more challenging for individuals to access diverse news sources than it is today. He said "by far the biggest" information filter in Facebook's system is the company's finding that users generally don't click on or engage with content that contradicts their own views.

"Presenting people with diverse information is important and, and I hope we can make progress," Zuckerberg said. "We haven’t gotten people to engage with it in higher proportions."

Zuckerberg didn't seem to suggest in his interview whether the country was better or worse off after Trump's win.

"We have a lot of work to do," Zuckerberg said. "That would have been true either way."

"I don’t think it would be right to say it changes the funadmental arc of technology or progress," he added, reaffirming his commitment to education, curing disease, connecting people to each other and the Internet and building artificial intelligence and virtual reality tools. Zuckerberg continued, saying he doesn't want to "downplay the impact" of the election, but believes that "most progress is made by private citizens."

Zuckerberg's interview followed a post he shared on Wednesday after the election with the status, "feeling hopeful."

"We are all blessed to have the ability to make the world better, and we have the responsibility to do it," Zuckerberg wrote in his post, which described his experience watching the election with his daughter Max. "Let's go work even harder."

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also posting on Facebook about the election, writing on Thursday: "Today we recommit ourselves to leaning in."

"This was a historic election for women," Sandberg continued. "For the first time in our country's history, a woman was the nominee of a major party, and over 59 million Americans voted to put Hillary Clinton in the highest office in the land. Even though we fell short, that should make us all proud."

Zuckerberg said he thinks the company's biggest responsibility to the country as a democracy is to "give people a voice," whether they're voters or candidates.

"When you look at a country where people haven't had tools like this, it can have a big impact on civic discourse," Zuckerberg said. "I'm proud of that."

I'm a San Francisco-based reporter on Forbes' tech team. I cover tech with an emphasis on the people, companies and innovations in the world of social and digital media. Before joining Forbes, I worked as a news writer and producer at The Wall Street Journal in New York. I ...